Writing Stories

 

Chinese New Year this week - The year of the Rabbit

As Communications Missionaries, one of our responsibilities is to write news stories about important events and publish those stories on the Church's social media sites or the Newsroom for the country we are in. We just finished this story about the FSY (For the Strength of  Youth conference) that took place in December in Kuching. See the link below.

Link to FSY Story

We are currently working on two other stories. One of them is about the Humanitarian work of the Church in East Malaysia and the other one is a personal interest story about one of our members who is a clinical psychologist and volunteers whenever disasters occur to provide counselling to victims. When we finish these stories I will include something about them in this blog. 

We attend events, take pictures, and conduct interviews to gather the data for our stories. I brought my Nikon digital SLR with me which I sometimes use but very often our smart phone pictures are good enough to use for these stories and a bit more discreet. It's easier to get the candid shots with our phones that we can then use in our articles. It seems like every time I point the lens of my Nikon at someone to take a candid shot they will notice that I am about to take their picture and they can't resist smiling and posing for the shot. Another tool that I have found very valuable is the voice recording app on my iphone. It's so much easier to record an interview or a speech and then go back and transcribe the quotes than to try to write down the quotes on the fly. 

In Malaysia we post the articles in English because so many people speak English here. For the Indonesian Newsroom, however, we publish the articles in Indonesian. In these cases, I will first write out the article in Indonesian and then submit it to a member of the Church's publication staff to correct my language and make it read more natural for the Indonesian audience. After we have prepared an article for publication it is sent to a local leader for approval before we actually publish it. After an article is published on Newsroom it is easy to share it on Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or other channels. It can also be picked up and re-published by local news media or by the Church News. One or our articles in Indonesia was re-published by the Church News and received much larger readership and many more comments than any of our other articles. 

Another cool project that we are working on here in Malaysia is a Community Service Award event. We will hold this event at a church building in East Malaysia were we will present two awards to people in the community who have made outstanding contributions in terms of service to the community. This event is hosted by the Church but it will involve people of all religions and backgrounds including other charitable organizations and government officials. I will also post some pictures from this event in June after it's over.

Now you know a little bit about what we are doing on our mission. It is challenging because neither of us have backgrounds in communications or public affairs but we are finding our way and seem to be getting better at it every month.

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